Wednesday, June 7, 2017

Emotion and Entertainment

Robert Turner shares some well-earned advice to pulp writers in his 1948 booklet, Pulp Fiction.

I hope you know what emotions are, because they play a
prominent part in this not so gentle art of fiction writing. You, as a writer,
are going to play on emotions, with words, as a pianist tickles the ivory keys
with his fingers. At least, you are if you intend to succeed as a fiction
writer.

We all have emotions. Prod any reader’s emotional reflexes
and, Mr. and Mrs. Writer, you are going to entertain him. I am not a
psychologist, so perhaps my definitions of these terms will not be technically
correct. But they will serve the purpose to show you what I am getting at, I
think.

To me, the condition of being entertained is a comparative
state. It is being aware, the opposite of being bored. If you needle a reader’s
emotions, he cannot be bored. There are many ways to do this. The more of them
that you learn, the more powerful and successful a writer you will become. That
is why, forever after you have sold your first story, you will constantly study
people and other writer’s work, to learn more and more of the tricks of getting
at people’s emotions.

Examples are sometimes good for clarification. Okay. Let’s
say that you love dogs. You are walking along the street and you see some guy
kicking the hell out of some skinny, half starved little pooch. Or some
sadistic guttersnipe is tying tin cans onto a puppy’s tail. What do you feel?
It can be anger, or sympathy, or both. Those are emotions.

All right, there are two nice little emotions all lined up
and dusted off for you. Use them in a story. Substitute the villain or one of
his henchmen for the guy doing the kicking in the example used. Substitute your
hero--or heroine--for the pooch. I’ve started many a story that’s sold, with
the hero getting hell beat out of him--or just coming out of unconsciousness
and pulling himself to his feet, after taking a shellacking. The reader feels
sorry for the character, he feels sympathy toward him. You have aroused an
emotion; therefore, you are entertaining the reader.

To do this properly, of course, you have to build a scene
that comes alive in the reader’s mind. That hinges on the subject of realism
and we will deal with that in due time. In the street scene example, something
is really happening and you damned well know that, because you can hear the dog
squealing or whining and you can hear the guy cussing and the sound of his boot
connecting with the animal’s ribs. In the story scene, you’ve got to kid the
reader into thinking it is actually happening. We will cover that, later.

Now, for Job’s sake, please don’t start every story from
here on in, with some poor guy getting the bejabbers beat out of him. That is
only one way to arouse one emotion in a reader. There are hundreds--perhaps
thousands--of other ways.